Is it any helpful to increase CPU priority level for specific programs?

[Russell18]

Hi Friends,

Is it any helpful to increase CPU priority level for certain apps or programs? Does it really make any difference in the performance?

[watercooled]

Not really for the majority of desktop systems. Provided you're not trying to do something like gaming while a video is encoding in the background with the same priority level, the scheduler should do a good enough job by itself. Many applications already request sane priority levels e.g. BelowNormal for some video encoders.

You're not going to improve performance of the only app running on a system by changing its priority level, that's akin to the 'optimisations' recommended by people who don't really know what they're suggesting e.g. disabling indexing on SSDs, changing number of cores assigned to boot in msconfig, etc. At best they achieve nothing, at worst they actually cause harm. Yet they're still echoed around the web as sane advice...

A word of advice - never set *anything* manually to Realtime priority unless you *really* know what you're doing - setting a demanding load to Realtime has the potential to lock up the system and could be especially problematic if it's scheduled to launch at boot!

[OOSeven]

If you want to get better benchmark scores in the likes of say Cinebench then you can bump the priority and it will generally improve. Bumping it too far can cause a system crash though. Above normal is about as far as you should go without watching your PC reset Otherwise it's generally pointless.

[kalniel]

If you want to get better benchmark scores in the likes of say Cinebench then you can bump the priority and it will generally improve.

I don't think it will. Better to simply not run stuff at the same time.

[james9909]

Not necessarily

[Froger007]

Not really since windows 10 and modern hardware is very good at scheduling things already. If your coding or want to prioritise something specific running high loads then it might help but not much.